He'd travelled Britain in a horse and caravan following the first world war and was sort of "in" with the travelling people. He subsidised his dogs catches by doing illegal bare knuckle boxing matches. He was a big, big bugger of a man and most of his many children both lawful and illegitimate not only respected him , they feared him. I got on very well with him just as soon as he noted my interest in things like rabbit snaring and training dogs. I think he also liked the way I would fight at the drop of a pin ! 
Other family members may not have liked him much but I did. It was he who squashed my mothers and fathers objections to me having my first dog at 14 years old. He let me keep her at his house just a couple of hundred yards along the road. His stipulations for her remaining in his house were that she was entirely my responsibility.
I was to feed her , I was to clean up any mess she made, I was to take her out early morning, noon, lunchtime from school, late afternoon and in the evening. I was to train her and he would check to see how she was doing. I kept my word and he kept his and we got on great. He told me tales of living with the travelling people that just about curdled my blood ....if they were true but I never caught him out with a lie. He hated lying or so my mother told me, she'd had her ass whacked for it with his cut-throat razor strop !
I always regretted that I hadn't known my grandfather as a still active man. The furthest I ever went with him from his house in Gorgie was to the bowling club. He sat me on his knee when I was still very young and let me drink the foam off the top of his pint of beer. I can still remember him pulling me away from the glass while laughing and saying , "Just the foam, ye wee bugger ! Just the foam !" .....Happy memories !
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My young border collie had won the Pre-Beginners test at the dog show but trouble loomed ahead for no matter what article I tried him with he would not even touch it far less pick it up and retrieve it. If I were to continue as a competition obedience man then somehow he just had to retrieve and retrieve very well and very "accurately" with a perfect sitting present.
The bloke then the head trainer of the obedience club was able to read people very well. He could not tell me how to get my dog to retrieve but he knew exactly which buttons to push to get me to train the dog to retrieve. He goaded me unmercifully at every opportunity that I and my "wonder dog" had come to the end of the line. I seethed quietly and barely restrained myself from dotting his nose !
I am one of those weird people who do better when angry or under pressure ....I even enjoyed exams at school and I loved fighting at school and out on the streets as a kid. I'd fight at the least hint of a challenge. With my oddball likings for things like "nature study" and reading and writing and even poetry and art, it was just as well I liked fighting too for my likings were not normal things for kids from my area of Edinburgh to put it mildly ! I got plenty of challenges.
With just a couple of weeks to go before the next obedience show I tried every trick and stratagem I could think of to get my dog to retrieve. The clubs head trainer goaded me again during a pub night out and this time I responded but not with a punch to his nose. I stepped up the pressure on myself by entering my dog for the next couple of levels up all in the one dog show.
One of those classes required a simple retrieve done well but the one above that, "Test A " I think it was called , required not only a retrieve of a dumbell but a scent discrimination search and retrieve too among several articles.
By the Friday just prior to the Saturday competition I still hadn't even got him to walk out to pick up an article. As a last resort I decided to try something I'd heard of but no more than that. All I knew about it was that there was a training method called the forced retrieve or F.F. for short. The Force Fetch is not a method I would use to train any gundog . It just does not suit me, I don't like to inflict pain on any animal or bird. I try to kill things when out shooting but, for me, that is my limit.
I knew nothing about how to train F.F. so I made up my own "method" and settled down on the Friday afternoon in the hallway of my house to train my dog by force. He was a very, very "tough" sort of dog and it was just as well that he was. I literally forced him out to the dumbell I tossed down the hall, forced him to bend his head to it and forced him to take it into his mouth. Then I forced him to keep pushing up against me all the way back up the hall with the dumbell in his mouth. It was nothing like the ways in which I later read F.F.ing should be done.
I did not break it all down into a chain for the dog, it was hard on the dog and it was hard on me but by the end of the afternoon he was retrieving and doing an obedience style present with the dumbell. Now I wrapped a strip of rough cloth around the dumbell and had him retrieve that. Both the dumbell and the cloth now had my scent and his all over them. I removed the cloth from the dumbell and had him retrieve that on it's own. This was followed by a very quick try at doing the same things outdoors, I only did that a couple of times because if the behaviour pattern had broken down outdoors I could have done nothing about it in time for the show. I'd done as much as I could and certainly more than I should have....he was now ready for those obedience rings.
He did very well and won both his classes on that same Saturday. Even the scent discrimination and retrieve test went brilliantly. As the scent article I used the same strip of cloth he had previously retrieved. I ended up in a run-off for first place and the judge had us do another retrieve as the tie-breaker. My dog just beat the other dog with a better sit/present and I left the ring jubilant and wasted no time in crowing to my trainer who had been watching all this along with some other club members. No more jibes came my way from him and he was very complementary until my dog decided enough was enough of all this nonsense and made clear his feelings by peeing up and down my leg ! Every one around that I'd been bragging to just about collapsed laughing , it was funny. Dogs can't half bring you back down to earth with a bump .
He was the kind of dog I like, he had a lot of character.
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To be continued
Wullie
